Restoration Team

Rob Byrne is project leader and restorer for The Last Edition.  An independent film preservationist as well as President of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Rob specializes in silent era film restoration.  He has worked in conjunction with EYE Film Instituut Nederland, Cinémathèque française, and the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum on restoration projects including: Shoes (1916), The Spanish Dancer (1923), The Half-Breed (1916), Twin Peaks Tunnel (1917), and The Last Edition (1925). Rob has published articles and reviews in the Journal of Film Preservation, The Moving Image, and Nisimazine, and he has contributed program notes for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. Rob holds a MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam and was the 2011 recipient of the Haghefilm Foundation Fellowship and a 2010 preservation grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Annike Kross studied restoration of Moving Image and Photography at the University of Applied Science in Berlin, graduating cum laude in 2006. The topic of her final thesis was ‘The Simulation Of Tinting And Toning Using The So-called Desmet Method’. Since 2007 Annike has worked at EYE Film Instituut Nederland as a film restorer and is responsible for the restoration of many titles, including J’accuse (Abel Gance – FR, 1919), Shoes (Lois Weber – USA, 1916) and The Spanish Dancer (Herbert Brenon – USA, 1923). Annike is the supervising restorer from EYE for the collaborative restoration project of The Last Edition. She is responsible for the creation and scanning of the black and white preservation dupe negative from the original tinted and toned nitrate print from the EYE’s collection. Furthermore she is supervising the digital grading of the black and white files before the creation of the newly restored negative, as well as the analogue grading of the answer print which will be made using the Desmet method.

Lotte Belice Baltussen studied on the MA Preservation and Preservation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam in 2008/2009. She works at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in the Research Development department. Here, Lotte participates in a range of national and European projects all to do with the accessibility, interoperability and enrichment of audiovisual heritage. Together with Oliver Gee, Lotte translated the The Last Edition‘s intertitles from Dutch into English. As the only known surviving print, these Dutch intertitles provide the only guide as to their original appearance. This was not a straightforward task as the archaic Dutch contained words that are no longer in use.

Oliver Gee studied Dutch language and literature at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. He did research for the Museum of Dutch Literature in The Hague and specializes in Dutch literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together with Lotte Belice Balthussen, Oliver translated the The Last Edition’s intertitles from Dutch into English. With help of his knowledge of everyday Dutch language of the twenties, he could interpret the often obscure turns of phrase used in the surviving intertitles and thus help recreate the original texts.

Simon Manton Milne was awarded a fellowship from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival to document the restoration of The Last Edition. Managing this website, Simon will highlight the current processes involved in the restoration of this historic film and give an introduction to The Last Edition itself. Currently a MA student on the University of Amsterdam’s Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image program, Simon has previously worked in film preservation and upon an educational website promoting the use of digitized archival film in learning environments. His current research interests relate to the role and ramification of digitization processes in film preservation and inter-archive approaches to threatened collections.